Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

The Narrative Fallacy writes "The Washington Post reports that online swindling takes dedication even in the best of times but succeeding in the midst of a worldwide economic meltdown takes patience, resolve, and hard work. 'We are working harder. The financial crisis is not making it easy for them over there,' said Banjo, 24, speaking about Americans, whose trust he has won and whose money he has fleeced, via his Dell laptop. 'They don't have money. And the money they don't have, we want.' US authorities say Americans — the easiest prey, according to Nigerian scammers — still lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year to cybercrimes, including a scheme known as the Nigerian 419 fraud, named for a section of the Nigerian criminal code. 419 is cemented in Nigerian popular culture. and the scammers, known as 'yahoo-yahoo boys,' are glorified in pop songs such as 'Yahoozee,' which gained even more fame after former secretary of state Colin L. Powell danced to it at a London festival last year."

I don't know - but when you read that the scammers are being effectively scammed themselves, it warms my heart.

But in these tough times, the scammers said, they are relying more on a crucial tool: voodoo. At times, Banjo said, he has traveled six hours to the forest, where a magician sells scam-boosters. A $300 powder supposedly helps scammers "speak with authority" when demanding payment. A powder, rubbed on the face, reportedly makes victims viewing the scammer through webcams powerless to say no.

"No matter what, they will pay," said Olumide, a college student, adding that he is boosting his romance scams by wearing a magical, live tortoise hanging from a cord around his neck.

You need to look at African history again - I am certainly not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but warfare (and incidentally slavery) in Sub-Saharan Africa is as old as civilization in Sub-Saharan Africa. For example: Military History of the Mali Empire [wikipedia.org]. The scale of the conflicts was never what it was in Europe and Asia until the 20th century, but that Africa was a collection of totally peaceful isolated tribes until Europeans arrived on the scene is a myth.

It's ironic, actually, the (arguably legitimate) western reaction against the excesses and cruelties of imperialism and colonialism ended up, in a fair number of cases, actually weakening understanding of the local populations, cultures, and history(and in a way oddly similar to the one that colonialism itself did).

The stock "history" of the bluntest anti-imperialist position is basically "And the noble savages lived happily in idyllic little tribes and Harmony with the land, until the British showed up and shot everyone and nicked their stuff." is almost exactly as reductive as the stock "history of the bluntest pro-imperialist position, which is basically "And the barbarious savages lived in primitive tribes, practicing devil worship and savagery, until the British showed up and civilized everybody and put the land to productive use."

"Agents of the colonial powers arrived on the scene of what was already, and had long been, a complex political and social stage, full of all kinds of various actors and groups, and had to shrewdly navigate a complex web of political interrelations and interactions in order to get anywhere." is much less cleanly satisfactory to either party; but is arguably much more accurate.

"Agents of the colonial powers arrived on the scene of what was already, and had long been, a complex political and social stage, full of all kinds of various actors and groups. And then they showed them how gunpowder works, whereupon the natives were so impressed they fell over and died."

A successful culture will adapt when new technology arrives. Japan dit it. China is doing it. Europe itself dit it, gunpowder after all isn't a western invention. Technology only gives a very temporary advantage, it is culture that matters.

I'm sceptical: there is plenty of evidence of contact and conflict between populations, tribes, and whatnot in Africa. Further, there are known instances of innovation in the service of success in those conflicts(Shaka's career in empire building being perhaps the notable example).

I'd be more inclined to blame quirks of geography and environmental biology. Africa has a massive interior area compared to its coastline, and IIRC, the worst ratio of navigable rivers to interior area of any inhabited continent. It also has few usefully domesticated animals. There goes most of your trade, beyond seriously high value/unit weight stuff.

The continent also, because of its climate and biology, has an enormous disease load, which imposes a substantial toll on all activities of life, particularly dire for dense populations(of the sort almost always associated with division of labor, and intellectual, technological, and social development).

As others have pointed out, you need to review history a bit more. For about 1200 years, the "Moors" (derived meaning "Black") were the conquerors, taking millions of europeans and middle eastern people. Some estimate the number to be approx 40 million. When the Moors sided with the Arabic people, it was very very bad for the Europeans.

Not to say the Europeans were exactly innocent. The "political" systems in place lead to slavery of the general population by the nobility. Needless to say, border disputes were anything but friendly for centuries.

It's easy to believe that the Africans were simple people running around in small tribes who knew nothing but peace and avoiding being eaten by lions, but the Euro/American slave trade triangle was just another very dirty chapter in human history, not the only one like it.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana (1863-1952)
The Life of Reason (1905-1906)
Volume 1, Reason in Common Sense - pg 284

I like to believe that humanity had a kind, gentle history at some point, but in reality there's been an awful lot of blood shed and oppression. It's important for us to know the mistakes we've made before, so we can be better in our future.

Genetics have nothing to do with behavior. All humans are the same. They do learn from their environment. Greed has spread like an epidemic around the planet, and we're seeing the collapse of that system now. It's funny that the scam artists are now complaining that their marks are all running dry.

Coccotti: Sicilians are great liars. The best in the world. I'm a Sicilian. And my old man was the world heavyweight champion of Sicilian liars. And from growin' up with him I learned the pantomime. Now there are seventeen different things a guy can do when he lies to give him away. A guy has seventeen pantomimes. A woman's got twenty, but a guy's got seventeen. And if you know 'em like ya know your own face, they beat lie detectors to hell. What we got here is a little game of show and tell. You don't wanna show me nothin'. But you're tellin' me everything. Now I know you know where they are. So tell me, before I do some damage you won't walk away from.

Cliff: You know I read a lot. Especially things that have to do with history. I find that shit fascinating. In fact, I don't know if you know this or not, Sicilians were spawned by niggers.

Coccotti: Come again?

Cliff: It's a fact. Sicilians have nigger blood pumpin' through their hearts. If you don't believe me, look it up. You see, hundreds and hundreds of years ago the Moors conquered Sicily. And Moors are niggers. Way back then, Sicilians were like the wops in northern Italy. Blond hair, blue eyes. But, once the Moors moved in there, they changed the whole country. They did so much fuckin' with the Sicilian women, they changed the blood-line for ever, from blond hair and blue eyes to black hair and dark skin. I find it absolutely amazing to think that to this day, hundreds of years later, Sicilians still carry that nigger gene. I'm just quotin' history. It's a fact. It's written. Your ancestors were niggers. Your great, great, great, great, great-grandmother was fucked by a nigger, and had a half-nigger kid. That is a fact. Now tell me, am I lyin'?

In Latin, the word maurus (plural mauri) means coming from Mauretania...a Roman province on the north western fringe of Africa (-> Morocco) (see wikipedia)
So basically Moors means those from North Africa. They aren't sub-Saharan. The core people of the Moors were "berbers"...Not arabs but not black either.

If you need a real successful "black" civilization. I suggest you to take a closer look at the Nubian civilization. They fought for centuries against the Egyptians, the Greek dynasty and they finally crushed a Roman invasion. The defeat was so devastating, that the Romans signed a peace treaty and they never came back. The Nubian queen are famous (Amanishaketo, etc) nowadays due to recent discoveries.

Or the Ethiopian one, they succeeded to stop the early Muslim invasion (this where the legendary King John was supposed to live, European crusaders tried for years to get in touch with him to fight together the Muslims). They fought for decades against the Italians and they were the first to gain their independence. The famous city of Timbuktu having healthy intellectual/philosophical debates while Europe was experiencing inquisition, etc.

You need to read "Guns, Germs & Steel" by Jared Diamond. The conclusion he comes to is that it's absolutely not genetics - it's a combination of geography and natural plant & animal life, leading to more stable populations (farmers vs. hunter/gatherers). This then leads to disease resistance (contact with domesticated animals boosts our immune systems), better, more nutritional crops, and greater population density leading to faster innovation.

My post was a combination of whoring for "funny" and impotently expressing my displeasure with Goldman's more or less perfect execution of regulatory capture.

If anything, I suspect that the Nigerian scammers are, on the whole, smart, motivated and fairly unprincipled, guys working in a tough competitive market. I have no love for scammers, and I'd be delighted to have them all hunted down; but underestimating the capabilities needed for crime, particularly fraud based crime, is just silly.

The former live in a backwater that escapes the label "dystopian" only through lack of technological development, while the latter have a revolving door between Wall Street and government all across the first world?

I'm doing exactly that. The fact that they "made it through the crisis" and many of their competitors didn't(and the guys who owed them money were bailed out, allowing those debts to be paid in full, so it isn't directly government money) merely makes them the most successful of the scammers.

Everyone needed government money, if AIG had failed Goldman would be dust in the wind (their hedges wouldn't have paid off, because no one would have had money). Also, they only are making money because of the cheap FDIC loans which are still providing government subsidized loans.

If you mean this : Media misunderstanding on GS and zloty [polishmarket.com.pl] it was more like media not making real research on a subject and repeating hearsay. IOW business as usual, as media these day , except for a few rare exception, are glorified parrot.

Meme or not, you and everyone in the Western world needs to get used to the idea that a very small number of Golden Boys on Wall Street, in cahoots with a somewhat larger number of politicians, managed to STEAL billions of dollars from small investors and taxpayers.

There has been little secrecy regarding deregulation of the securities and exchanges over the last 16 to 20 years. The democrats played ball with Wall Street when Clinton was in, then Bush came along and got serious about deregulation. Wall Street knew all along that they were selling worthless paper to fools who were happy to buy that worthless paper on credit. The emperor had no clothes, but no one wanted to recognize that fact.

Look at the events that brought down Wall Street in 1929, then look again at our recent crisis. Really look at them, then come back to explain any substantial differences.

If, and I emphasize IF, we really have reached the bottom, and we are on our way up again, then we have been far more lucky than we deserve. There were blatantly obvious signs of how much trouble we were in, as far back as the Enron scandal. A decent economist with a real education should have seen what was happening as much as 5 years before the Enron scandal broke.

Fools and crooks. To hold Goldman Sachs out as being better than the rest of Wall Street is to admit that they were fools, if lesser fools than their buddies sitting in offices all around them.

Don't be sick or the "meme". Instead, get sick of, and get outraged at our economics "experts" who dug the hole that we are in today. The meme is here, and it will be around for quite awhile. The only question is, are we going to learn from it, or will we do this again in 20 to 50 years?

Go on, call a spade a spade. Bigtime thieves and fools put the screws to all us little fools. And we are still damned fools, for allowing the bastards to have their bonuses. Plain English defines a bonus as something earned for superior performance. There is no one on Wall Street who has earned a bonus in recent history.

1. Lack of integrity among business executives2. Lack of responsibility among the accountants3. An overlap of authority, with executives ordering and/or intimidating accountants4. Lack of oversight by government through it's regulatory agencies5. Obvious burning greed among executives - even AFTER Enron burned to the ground, executives expected to get their "performance" bonuses.6. A legal system that managed to find cretins low enough to represent said executives in their

They're pretty much the only major financial institution to make it through this crisis without falling for the scams and without needing government money. In fact, they were forced to take it by the government so that people wouldn't single out companies receiving bailout money as being failures

Nah, Americans are just fucking stupid. Our education system breeds retards who aren't expected to think more than what "OMGWTFBFF" text message they are going to send next. Set low expectations and that's what you'll get, so we got it. And if you think I'm just trolling or flame baiting, do some google searches and see what simple shit questions the typical American can't answer. It's shocking.
FYI...I'm an American.

do some google searches and see what simple shit questions the typical American can't answer. It's shocking. FYI...I'm an American.--

it's amazing how dumb you can make someone look when you write questions with the idea of seeing how dumb you can make them look. (Some dumb British comedian even made a movie about it a few years back.)

Most of the questions you'll see asked are simply irrelevant to an American's life. And as such, if you ask them right off the head, they often as not won't have an answer. This is not a sign of poor thinking -- it's a sign of INTELLIGENCE.

because when all is said and done, the Interviewer gets to fly back to his airconditioned condo in New York, drink expensive Hawaiian coffee and tool around in his BMW. The Interviewee gets to stay and sweat like a pig in the swampy hellhole called Nigeria, where he gets to slap some stupid jitney driver in the unending clusterfuck they call traffic, and suck down a lukewarm coke in the muddy concrete and cardboard dump he calls home, as the interviewer operates from the "there but for the grace of god go

I don't know... living in New York myself,
sweat like a pig in the swampy hellhole, where he gets to slap some stupid jitney driver in the unending clusterfuck they call traffic, and suck down a lukewarm coke in the muddy concrete and cardboard dump he calls home sounds exactly like here. You get those locales backwards or something?

1) The correspondant writes for the WASHINGTON post, and SHE lives in SOUTH AFRICA. Where does it say anything about New York?2) I think you seriously overestimate what a print journalist makes.3) I think you seriously underestimate the conditions the Nigerian scammers (and the middle/upper class in their country) live in

I'd assume lukewarm dom would be just as expensive, but then again, I would have assumed that no one would actually buy booze for over a hundred dollars a bottle, regardless of how much money they scammed online.

Probably for (in the broad sense) the same reasons that an undercover cop doesn't attempt to arrest the mob boss, and a spy is a diligent worker, not a slacker, at whatever facility he is infiltrating.

Journalists, ideally, are a society's way of getting and broadly disseminating certain types of information. In this case, the value of the public knowing more about Nigerian scammers is easily higher than the value of one scammer possibly getting a slap on the wrist, or even a bullet in the face. There are all sorts of situations where doing the proximate "right thing" will mean losing the broader advantage: taking down the little fish and missing out on the expose of the little fish's boss.

This is especially true in situations where the journalist is operating against the currents of official interest/motivation. If the feds, either here or in Nigera, really cared(about anything other than the highest profile and most exceptional or publicly emotive cases) they'd find it trivial to hunt down large numbers of these guys. Just get a whole bunch of spamtrap accounts, scattered randomly across common webmail services, ISP email offerings, and the like. When the inevitable submissions come, act like marks until you have enough info to track the guys down. In general, interest is limited. Thus, raising interest/awareness in the issue, and possibly helping people protect themselves more effectively, is a lot more valuable than just identifying some minor player who could have been identified already if anybody cared. (In the context of internal political reporting, the situation is similar. Corruption at the low levels is generally a symptom of much more serious high level corruption, and exists because the powers that be don't care. Raising the issue of a single corrupt cop or DMV chair warmer, or whatever, is nice; but is like trying to empty a lake with a shovel. You really want journalists to go for the core of the problem.)

The FBI et. all don't actively pursue Nigerian scammers for the simple reason that they cannot pursue Nigerian scammers. It has nothing to do with "taking down the boss". If those Nigerians lived in the US they would be in jail. Period.

First, the US cannot go after Nigerian scammers because they live in frickin Nigeria, the US has no authority there and at best can only exert a moderate amount of pressure to encourage Nigerian officials to pursue the scammers.

Second, every US citizen has the right to be a dumbass. There was a story here on/. a few months ago of a woman who sent around $450k to a Nigerian scammer. She blew her husband's retirement on it even. The entire community knew it was happening, and tried to stop her, told her she was being scammed, hell the sheriff even asked her to stop, but there was nothing they could legally do to stop her from pissing her money away. She was convinced each time that she was just "one more payment" away from getting those millions of dollars. Where the hell her husband was this whole time I have no idea, but if someone wants to be a dumbass nobody has a right to stop you unless you are doing something illegal.

Getting scammed is not illegal.

Nigerian officials obviously aren't going to do more than a token attempt to go after these guys to improve US relations, because they boost the Nigerian economy. Think about it, they are getting US money by exporting idiocy. And Americans buy it in droves, unfortunately.

There are various forms of scams where people in the US are needed. I was in one (no, I didn't lose money, I just wanted to see where it would lead) where the scammer mailed me 6 $1000 CVS money orders by MoneyGram. I knew I would be arrested if I tried to cash the money orders. Anyway, I wanted to play along and see where it would lead but the scammer's English started deteriorating to such a point that I didn't even want to keep communicating.

If that stuff was sent to you via the U.S. Postal Service you should contact the local Postal Inspector. They're actual federal law enforcement officers, just like the FBI and Secret Service, and they love to catch people using the mail to break the law, any law.

We all say "that scam is stupid, it could not happen to me", and then I watched a video demo of the "pidgeon drop" confidence game.

I can kinda see being taken by some scam artist where there is some face-to-face contact. The way the "pidgeon drop" works is that the con artists drop some envelope full of money behind you, the con calls your attention to it "is this your money you dropped. Part of how this work is that an accomplice walks by posing as a "disinterested third party" to build up the crucial

you might be interested in my comedy novelet, where this slashdot guy, call him whoseisname, just hates nigerian scammers and performs a social engineering experiment. He responds to several of their spam scams, gets their instructions and strings them along getting them to believe large sums of money are coming their way. But slashdot guy starts sending them responses leading them to believe one scammer group has interfered with and intercepted the funds meant for another. Thus he gets the Nigerian scam

Great idea, it would certainly encourage all other "bad guys" to accept interviews with the medias...

Reporters do not shoot their informant, that is the way it works...

You could just as well ask clinton why did he not just shoot the "dear leader" in N Korea when he met him....(ok so he'd die, the US Hostage also, but no price is too high ? oups of course there would be that little issue with being a suicide something getting a bad press recently..)

Yeah I did that for a while, it's a blast...I have several voice recordings of VERY pissed off east Africans:-) Never went for trophy pics or anything though. I highly recommend the Slashdot crowd checks it out...they 419eater crew runs a clean shop, they're very stringent on scambaiting for de-education of the scammers and making sure to not provide them any materials (fake IDs, etc) that could be used on real victims. They have a lot of neat tools to make the process easier and generally waste scammer time.

There must be some kind of famine or something in Nigeria, I've received about 15 emails in the last 3 months, all from people telling me their father/brother/uncle/etc. had "caught death". Terrible!And to make matters worse, they can't get the money that's rightfully theirs from the banks! Honestly, something should really be done about this.

Scamming works, even for schemes widely known from years. Be an scammer and will be pretty rare that you get caught, in your country will make songs about you, and even the Washington post will put your name in big letters. And money flow so much that even in this troubled economic times is still profitable, even with the amount of people doing it.A bit remembers me the amount of people buying what is offered by spam, and making it still a profitable activity, but this one goes some levels deep into the ill

How can you have sympathy for anyone who falls for this crap? In Nigeria 419 is viewed as a game. Anyone who plays (poor innocent Americans) is just greedy themselves. How dumb do you have to be to think that you can get something for nothing ? I hate the fact the Nigeria is given a bad rep for this, but Americans are xenophobic to anything especially from that country "Africa". Just wait until American realize Nigeria has a large Muslim population.....

in 2003 I recovered $15,000 for someone who lost their money to a web based computer scam. It was not easy and I didn't kill anyone (at the request on my client). Africa is a dangerous place. I have been doing stuff for a while, the odds of you getting all your money back are pretty much 0%. In fact I would say I did not get my clients money back, I probably got them someone else's money.

In 2008, I did NOT get a 90-year-old retired friend's money back. He lost over half a million dollars to a Nigerian scammer! I felt somehow personally responsible, because about a year ago, he came over to my office to request that I fax some financial documents to a bank in Switzerland. I didn't even look at them, other than to notice that one was for $200,000 and the other $350,000. Four months later, he came over and wanted me to fax some documents to a "barrister" in London. I couldn't get the phone number to work, so I started checking on the address. I found it was a phony address, but nestled right in amongst "barrister row" in a suburb of London. I started checking on the barrister, "David Mark". Surprisingly, he didn't even change his name, and was linked to dozens of Nigerian scams. He DID use a "hotmail" address, which is a big red flag for a "barrister":). I discovered this "barrister" was promising my friend to get some of his money back, but that it would require "$40,000" fee. Evil, this was just the scammers continuing to prey on this poor man who had already lost almost all his money. He had actually already travelled (I found out) to Amsterdam to meet with these people. He had the $40,000 in a money belt to give them, but the airport authorities wouldn't let him out of the airport with the money and deported him back to America. LUCKY! He could see the scammers on the other side of the airport lines, holding up a card with his name on it! That is how close he was to losing his last $40,000. I finally was able to convince him (it wasn't easy) that these were scammers, and that his only recourse was to report it to the FBI, and that he most likely would never see his money again. This was very very hard for him. And he was a retired ENGINEER, no dummy, a very smart person. But old people are vulnerable to this sort of thing. Please tell all your old retired friends about these scammers. They are real, very very convincing world-class scam artists. When they get a bite, they turn it over to their very best con artists, and your friends will be in real danger of being fleeced.

When I read the article, the thing that struck me was that the scammers are so desperate, they trying voodoo majic to boost their believability. One guy has a live tortoise hanging around his neck to boost his mojo. Sounds like a market ripe for a new product idea:

Your sma11 unit sales got you down? Bulk up that member ship!

Girls find you more attractive with our herbal honesty reproduction enhancer. Get more faith-time from those gullible Americans with new ultra power Premier gold medal deluxe Truth Be Told powder. Distilled from the pulverized testicles of tobacco company lawyers, this is genuine disingenuity at it's most potent concentration. Guaranteed to have them eating out of the palm of your hand, you will be invincible in email encounters.

They just target a different segment of the population now. When times are good they seem to focus on the not so bright who are slightly greedy with a little cash to spare. When times are tough they seem to focus more on the more vulnerable and desperate. To give an example I have been looking for a new apartment, and have been using craigslist to look for rentals. They still have deals that are too good to be true, and not just bait and switch deals from unscrupulous realtors. I ran across one where t

I have noticed that it is harder to engage in this activity. I used to enjoy wasting as much of these cat's time as possible and then arranging to meet them in London and never show. Then, when I get the response, "I was greatly disappointed to see that you never arrived for our meeting," I would come up with some other excuse like a sick family member or something or other and arrange another meeting. I would do this until I heard from the scammer no more. Might be that these guys share information because my email no longer gets 419 scams. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

I cruise at -1. Those that don't would never see the humor in some of this stuff if people didn't mod them up. Personally, I find some the humor absolutely hilarious but too many people will reach for the troll mod before the funny mod.

It is actually mildly amusing. I was just annoyed because I haven't seen a single mod point in almost a year and yet someone mods up nigger jokes is apparently getting them. Maybe that's what I should have been doing more of back when I was getting them:)